Line after line, it fills the screen, and never proceeds to the xwin load screen.

I attempted to boot from the PuppyLinux 5.2 CD I used to install it in the first place, and for some reason, I cannot get the PC to boot from the CD. It is set to boot from the CD first, then the HD, then the USB, and it does spin up the CD drive, but now it won't boot! Instead, it goes right to the HD and loads GRUB again.

While bad capacitors do plague almost every (if not every) major manufacturer from time to time, I've heard that certain models of eMachines are particularly prone to cap replacement issues -- I've had two examples of one of their worse offenders, the T2596. One died in a power outage --a bit like yours-- and (unfortunately) I didn't perform an autopsy, but the other is just fine and waiting for a new owner. So it's a bit of a crapshoot as to whether that's a problem you get to worry about, or not.

While Puppy can and does run well on systems most "Windows people" have long since left for the bleary-eyed curb scouts and Men With Big Trucks, if yours is particularly elderly (Pentium 4 or older) then you might consider an upgrade.

...actually, a note on the Pentium 4: these are notorious power-hogs at best. They were designed for multimedia performance, and excel at playing high-def videos, but for anything else, you're better off with a Pentium 3 or Pentium M CPU, because computing power for anything OTHER than multimedia on a P4 is practically nil.

Oh, and by the way, a particularly common Pentium 4 -- specifically the Northwood-core (core = architecture variant) mdoel that's rated for 3.2Ghz -- runs at 125W. That's a touch more than two 60W light bulbs and a nightlight. (Nightlights are 4W.) So Pentium 4s aren't very green, either. (Mind you, a Pentium M pulls about 35W, regardless of speed, which works out to a bit less than 1/4 of the energy that Pentium 4 yanks out of your wall...)_________________

Yes, this is an eMachine, a 5048 in fact. I received it from a friend whose wife was fed up with it occasionally shutting itself off, especially when it finally would do nothing else. Rather than take it to a shop, they gave it to me... and bought another eMachine! (the CPU fan was toast, and the unit shut itself off in self-protection. New fan, happy machine!)

I wondered whether it was hardware-related myself, actually- I have the CDR on IDE2, mostly due to the availability of bus cables- I didn't have one long enough to go from the MB to the CDR and then down to the HD! I have another old machine, a home-built 'beige box' that dumped its IDE2 many years ago, and I limped it along until this machine came available. Could be the same issue, who knows.

I do not have a bootable Puppy USB; the USB is in the boot path simply because it's the third option. I could turn it off, but never bothered. I could download a bootable Pup to a thumb drive (if I have one large enough... LOL! Try doing that with Win7) using this lappy of my wife's I'm currently typing on, and see how that goes.

While I have you on the horn, anyone have a link to an idiot's tutorial to the use of fsck? Might be in order, if I can even get this install back up and running.

1) The CDR is toast. The machine recognizes it, but it will not spin up when told to by the hardware. I swapped in a CDRW from our old machine, and it works just fine.

2) I don't know if IDE2 is good; I decided I didn't want to know, I want to fix the drive/install! I managed to get the HD close enough to the CDRW by putting it in the unused floppy bay to use one IDE cable for both drives, being sure to set Master and Slave accordingly.
(for some reason, that always puts me in a Cherry Poppin' Daddies mood)

3) The machine does have a boot-from-USB mode, but I think it only works if you have no bootable media otherwise. The boot path only includes the HD, the CD, Ethernet, or Floppy. I have it set in order, CD, HD, Floppy, Ethernet.
I don't know if it works otherwise, because the memory stick I THOUGHT I had been bright enough to use as a bootable USB is either not the one, or I wasn't bright enough. Nothing bootable on it, in any case.

Right now I'm running a HD verify program from UBCD, just to make sure the hardware is good. After this, I'm going to try to boot the Wary install CD I originally used, and see about checking the HD with it.

Any suggestions for checking the drive with the Puppy CD, or will it give me the option to check the install right away (as WinXP used to)?

Back on using the bootable Wary 5.2 CD. Going to fsck this drive (as soon as I can figure out how to do it safely, that is) and see what I see. Got a series of the same errors while the CD was loading into RAM, but it managed to get past it and load.

I don't have any experience at installing Puppy to hdd. For a long time I have installed another os to a small boot partition and booted Puppy by cd with a save file on a larger data partition. I used a partition cd to partition the hdd.
Cheers

Hi n9viw.
1) A new year mean new budgets. I suggest you visit some local companies, and ask if they are in the market for new computers this year, and can you have one of the old ones they are going to throw away, pleeeease?

2) I dare to suggest, that you in the future run from a live multisession CD/DVD, with savefile to the same disc, alternatively to a portable USB -HD or -stick. It works very well, and unless the disc player lites up and actually melts the disc, you'll be safe from all crashes.

I wish you all a Puppy New Year!

tallboy_________________True freedom is a live Puppy on a multisession CD/DVD.

N9viw, I don't know the answer to your question about fsck usage. I used the forum search feature to look for posts with fsck in them and got a thousand hits. Apparently there is a boot option "pfix=fsck". It looks like it should be safe. Can you try that?

Flash:
I, too, had searched Murga ad nauseum looking for something specifically related to the use of fsck as regards a crash and booting from a CD, and did not find anything that helped particularly well.
I, too, found the 'pfix=fsck' comment, but am at a loss as to how to add it to the boot string, considering that a) the CD from which I'm booting is 'closed', and b) it's already set to create a personal save-file on the HD, which renders the HD un-umount-able! BUGGER!

Tallboy:
No companies like that around here. I live in the MOzarks, which, for finding technological companies willing to sell off or throw away old hardware, is pretty much nil. I'll keep my eyes peeled, though.
If I can't fsck this drive, I may indeed re-install, and will keep your suggestion re: a flash save file in mind.

Starhawk:
I think my CD drive is toast because it's old. It was used when I bought it back in 1998. It was one of the first-gen CD/DVD-ROMs, a Hitachi GD-2000. Frankly, I'm surprised it lasted this long. I'll keep an eye on the PS voltages, in any case.

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